Oh what a night! The thrills, the spills, the profanities, the tears and sweet lord of UGLY the food! That’s right ardent viewers, Mick and Matt and Jenna and Joanna had Rico and I glued to our couch – and not just because the combination of lamington crumbs and spilled wine makes for an excellent adhesive.

You all know the drill: two teams face-off in a three-course cook to the death, judged by Frenchy Manu, skinny Pete, and an assortment of experts – including Fergus, our new Irish friend who doesn’t suffer fools – or clear speech – gladly.

Both teams have a plan. For Mick and Matt it’s for Matt to be the boss and Mick to be the giant, sarcastic prick in the background. For our lovelies, Jenna and Joanna, it’s for Joanna to do pretty much everything single-handed and let Jenna weep into her custard.

As they prepare to cook, Joanna tells Jenna that they can do this and that if Jenna gets in trouble, to just harden the FUCK up because, damn it bitch, she can’t be expected to cook the entree, main and the sonofabitching dessert! Jenna agrees that if she’s going to be the ball on Joanna’s chain, she’d better lose some pounds so that Joanna won’t chafe too badly dragging her incompetent ass around.

Over to the boys and Mick is talking up how, despite being the stunted, less capable version of him, Matt is the boss and he, Mick, is going to do as he’s told. He reckons the menu is Matt’s bag and by letting Matt take charge, he’ll have sufficient ammunition to take him to his death bed when this shit does the inevitable fat kid bombie into the public pool.

Cooking starts and immediately Mick starts whinging because he’s been given the job of prepping the prawns rather than stomping around the kitchen, brandishing a butcher knife and flicking Matt’s bra strap.

Over in cupcake country, Joanna is elbow deep in squid while Jenna starts on the mango mousse for dessert. Pete and Manu are watching and are worried that the beef ribs aren’t going in the oven and that Jenna appears to be wearing pink stockings paired with Crocs.

Both teams have chosen a seafood-based entree. For Mick and Matt it’s hot and spicy prawns; for Jenna and Joanna, some sort of blanched squid salad. And as entree cooking goes, it’s a pretty boring state of affairs. Aside from the first sign that Mick is a giant dick strapped into an apron when Matt burns the bottom layer of rice, it’s pretty dull and the entrees come out looking yawningly fine.

According to the judges, though, neither one is a direct hit. Mick and Matt’s entree is like bobbing for prawns in a bucket of sugar and, while Pete can taste the chilli, it isn’t nearly hot enough for him to strip down to his knickers and start belting out It’s Raining Men.

Our fuller-figured female judge with the Queen Alien hairstyle likes the fact that the girls’ salad makes her teeth get off their asses and WORK but the consensus on the squid is that it’s got all the flavour of an unused tampon and that boiling that shit in water rather than sticking it in a pan was riskier than Jenna’s lower-body ensemble.

Back in the kitchen and there’s a lot of support for the Pink Ladies. Personal Trainers, Luke and Scott, are squealing themselves hoarse with you-can-do-it’s and it-looks-great’s and show-us-your-tits’ and when the girls almost forget to cook their brocollini it’s a chorus of thousands from these fuckers who, when Mick and Matt forgot their slowly scorching cheesecakes, lost the power to give so much as a single fuck.

On the boys’ side and Mick is putting his sweaty back into making the fish look like it’s been dragged through a house of cats before making it to the plate. ‘Did you oil the grill?!” he barks at Matt.

Rico reckons Mick’s anger stems from Matt’s lack of height and the fact that he’ll never be able to carry his giant ass home from the pub after one too many white wine spritzers.

Matt, meanwhile, is busy churning out the least visually-pleasing accompaniment to fish I think I’ve ever seen. It’s lentils mixed with split peas and together is just a pebbly sludge that looks like the kind of carpet you’d lay in a primary school classroom known for its serial vomiters.

Over on the girls’ side and it’s like they’ve seen Matt’s chunderous efforts and are determined to top it. ‘Split peas and lentils have NOTHING on undercooked chickpeas!’ Joanna gloats – before realising she’s engaging in the wrong competition and trying to regroup with some poorly cooked bread.

But she’s gone too far: not only are her chickpeas about as likely to absorb the meat sauce as Jenna’s rubbery hoof-wear, but the bread is unusable and the beef ribs – hastily shoved in the pressure cooker though they were – are tougher than Kerry in a Coles aisle. So what choice does Joanna’s tongue have but to break up with its G-rated boyfriend and hop on the hog of a sailor who has a mouth like unwashed ass crack and isn’t afraid to kiss his mother with it?

‘It’s f*cked! F*ck this!’ she snaps. Jenna’s lip starts quivering and we see her wondering whether this is one of those times Joanna was referring to when she should ask for help. But then she takes another look at her previously sane team-mate strutting around the stove with the dictionary firmly opened to the F page and her survival instinct lurches its way out of its sugary hole and tells her in no uncertain terms to keep her pink mouth SHUT.

It’s a race for both teams to get something on the plate and, while they both do, it’s a matter of one dog and two breakfasts to choose from and none of the judges have had their shots.

First to be tasted is Mick and Matt’s and the judges agree that each mouthful brings a new explosion of fuckery. The fish is inconsistent and that khaki mess it’s draped on leaves every single one of them wishing for the simple days when fish came with chips handled by a pimply schoolboy.

And then it’s the girls’ turn and, for a minute, it looks like theirs is no better.

‘It’s TOOF!’ bellows Fergus and everyone agrees – but then Manu shuts the diss-show down and gets all whimsical about his childhood and how, when he was a child, his mother used throw a bucket of just this sort of slop in his face when she caught him making a penis moustache out of her false eyelashes.

Back in the kitchen and the dessert race is on. Joanna has calmed down and Jenna has stopped crying because she’s just revealed that her dessert has a surprise ingredient that is going to blow everyone’s socks off. It’s called sago and it’s a gluggy looking mess that Jenna says is yummier than swallowing a bucketful of warm spermbank offshoot.

Jenna being Jenna, though, she manages to amp up the chunder-factor and turn it into the kind of congealed mess that makes Rico take one hand off his wine bucket and place it protectively over his testicles.

Over at the boys’ bench and the cheesecakes that Angela and Melina helpfully pointed out to each other were burning, are getting pulled out of the fridge. Matt is devastated because the tops he knocked off earlier have not magically reappeared and he has to come up with a plan with his mammoth hulk of a father hissing lentil-breathed threats over his shoulder.

His solution is… Dumb. Actually, it’s more than dumb, it’s the equivalent of shoving a pretty shoe on a gangrenous foot when that shit just needs to be chopped OFF! That’s right food-loving friends, Matt’s big idea is to scrape off the cheese that didn’t meet his fist and make the meringue pretend it ain’t seen nuthin’.

Red-faced Mick, who seems to have recovered from his son dusting off the f-word and telling him to eat it during the mains round, reckons it looks ‘bloody gawjus’. I wonder if he’s being sarcastic but then I remember he’s Tasmanian and that their modelling agencies double as petting zoos and that if he could find a way to prove they’re related, he’d probably ask this plate on a date.

First to be tasted is Mick and Matt’s and the judges are unimpressed to discover there’s a layer of fuckery under the cake and that these lazy bastards have left the base of the cake tins on. Between that and the alluring flavour of charcoal, any chance that our father and son can claw their way back up from the pit and live to root another family member is well and truly gone.

This is hammered home when the judges scoff their way through the girls’ mango mousse. Yes, they think the saltiness of that spermy stuff that didn’t end up on the plate would have complimented it nicely, but there’s not an unlicked spoon in the house and, even if Adriano Zumbo would flick his polished little dome in disgust and call it pedestrian, compared to that charred cheeseless cake, it’s a winner!

Scoring fun and it’s all sevens for the girls and a walk on the hot plank of shame for the boys. Despite offering them less courtesy than an out-of-season Santa who shouts at trees and wants to fondle their children, the other contestants profess to be sad they are leaving.

‘It is so rare you meet such genuine people who can’t cook worth a fuck!’ someone wails.

Mick says that he is proud of his son for sailing them to a landslide defeat and that as soon as they get home to Tassie, he’ll show the runty little fucker just how proud he really is.

The show ends with a preview of the next ep, which apparently has our teams cooking for a whole slog of school children at the zoo.

Rico is excited because children tend to be ruthless little fuckers and he’s looking forward to observing Ali in her natural habitat.

I, on the other hand, am waiting to see which team will win the douchiest-dish-to-serve-to-kids award, by thinking this might actually be to do with cooking and not just who can shove the most chocolate onto a stick.